Now these are the nations which the Lord left, to prove Israel by them, even as many of Israel as had not known all the wars of Canaan;

Only that the generations of the children of Israel might know, to teach them war, at the least such as before knew nothing thereof;

Namely, five lords of the Philistines, and all of the Canaanites, and the Sidonians…

Judges 3:1-3.

For those of you that are left cold by such Biblical King James as per the passage above, pay attention to what is happening before you just turn away. Those who want to experience the adventure of following God are being admonished to make sure that each generation knows something of what it costs to be free.

This should be more exciting to every young man and woman than skiing, skating, dating or playing electronic games. Or getting drunk with the sorority sisters. Why do young people seem to be turned off to the challenges that motivated other generations? Because the parents have become so civilized that we aren’t teaching them war.

Read the passage again. It is not that we should teach our sons and daughters to love violence. But the commandments of the Lord, which he commanded Israel’s fathers by the hand of Moses, were to go in and occupy the land, driving out their enemies. When the people compromised and became politically correct (as we would say) and disobeyed, God used those nations to “prove” Israel by them. One of the themes of this ongoing conversation on Preparation is that God is using America’s enemies within and without to prove America.

The following reflections consider age-old issues that should be considered by every voter deciding what is at stake in our confrontation with power alignments occurring around the globe- all bent on destruction of America.

Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.

A Few Quick Lessons from the Peloponnesian War from the dean of U.S. military historians, Victor Davis Hanson:

1. Power without principle can have disastrous consequences. Likewise, weakness of character, vision, and national values will contribute decisively to national defeat.

2. Unconventional methods of warfare can dominate what originally may be viewed as a conventional war.

3. For Grand Strategy to be successful, it must be crafted thoughtfully, deliberately, and ultimately must be both flexible and adaptable.

Victor Davis Hanson’s Commentary on Causes, Relevance and Lessons Learned; Source: Victor Davis Hanson Interview (2006): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

“The reason we can study with value (and that’s a key word) and profit in a didactic fashion [from] Thucydides, the chronicler of, for example, the Peloponnesian Wars, [is] that the one requisite – human nature – doesn’t change. Humans in that book, or the humans in the Seven Years War, the humans in the Civil War, are all basically hardwired the same way, they had the same emotions, they’re subject to envy, pride. The Peloponnesian War, with the necessary changes being made (that is, technology), can tell us exactly why states go to war, how they feel, balance of power, deterrence, that we see in the present. If you don’t believe that, you would have to believe that just in the 2500 years of Western civilization we’ve had an accelerated Darwinian evolution of the human mind; or maybe [that] using computer games or using a computer has changed our circuitry and made us into people who are not subject to those [emotions]; or maybe, as therapists believe, we’re so affluent or so educated now that we don’t have to go back and worry about those primordial emotions. But it’s my view that Thucydides was right, that human nature hasn’t changed, and will not change, and therefore each war is instructive about other wars to come.”

-Victor Davis Hanson

A good volume to study in order to estimate the impact of protracted warfare is “A War Like No Other”, by Victor Davis Hanson.

Prof. Hanson is at his best in describing cultural metamorphoses in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) between commercial/democratic Athens with untrammeled naval power against a militaristic Spartan oligarchy with hoplite shock troops.

Both had allies, shifting alliances were the rule and terrorism became the order of the day after twenty-seven years of warfare. The Golden Age of Athens came to an end long before the Spartans conquered noble and cultured Athens. Here is Professor Davis again:

“It started in May of 431 [BCE] when Sparta preempted and crossed the border into Attica, which was the countryside of Athens. They said they did so because of various perceived grievances on the part of Athens, [that Athens] had encroached on their territory. But it was the judgment of the historian Thucydides that they did it for fear, generic fear. They wanted to stop this juggernaut before it took over the Greek world. Sparta was oligarchic, Athens was democratic; Sparta was a land power, Athens was a sea power; Sparta was parochial, Athens, cosmopolitan. They had these fault lines that were not to be bridged, and twenty-seven-and-a-half years later the war was over.

The fascinating thing about this was to win the war, Athens has to build an army to defeat the Spartan army, or Sparta had to build a fleet to defeat the Athenian fleet. You’d think that the conniving, quick-witted Athenians would have figured that out first, but that’s not what happened. Sparta built a fleet, defeated the Athenian fleet, broke up its maritime empire, bankrupted its treasury, cut off its food, and won the war.

Their strategies evolved. Sparta started the war with a very outdated strategy that had worked in small border wars among its own allies. Basically, “I will cross into someone else’s territory and I will attack their agriculture and that will make them so mad that they will come out and fight.” But in the case of Athens, if you have imported food, then you don’t really care what happens to the agriculture around you. So, the Athenians went into the walls.

By the same token, the Athenian strategy under Pericles was simply, “We will go into the walls, we will import food, we’ll keep our empire and its tribute intact, we will circle the Peloponnese and harass the Spartans. We can weather a war of attrition rather than annihilation longer, and we will not win, but because we don’t lose, the status before the war favored us, so all we have to do is tie.”

“The Spartans thought it was wise to devastate agriculture. That didn’t work. The Athenians thought it was wise to go inside the walls, and a city designed for 100,000 people quickly was decimated by a terrible plague. Maybe it was smallpox, maybe it was typhoid, but they lost somewhere around 80,000 of their own. The idea that Sparta could ever build a fleet was considered preposterous, but they turned out to be quite adept at it.”

Without starting a new book review, disease is one of the most foreseeable and yet usually unforeseen consequences of extended warfare. The watchman watches in vain unless God stands guard over the city.